of religious excitement by wild and furious dancing.[55\8] More often selected individuals, specially susceptible to such impressions, suffer their "souls" to be drawn out by music and dancing and every other sort of stimulating influence, and made to visit the world of spirits and gods.[56\8] Such "magicians" and priests who can place {262} themselves in immediate contact of soul with the spirit world, are to be found all over the globe. The shamans of Asia, the "medicine men" of North America, the Angekoks of Greenland, the Butios of the Antilles, the Piajes of the Caribbees are merely special cases of a universal type, essentially the same in all its different manifestations. Africa, Australia, and the island world of the Pacific are equally familiar with them. Both their performances and the range of ideas that lie behind them belong to a type of religious experience that occurs with the regularity of a natural phenomenon, and must therefore not be regarded as abnormal. Even among Christian peoples of long standing, the smouldering fires of this primitive and emotional type of religion are ever ready to burst out again in renewed flames, and those who feel their warmth are kindled to a more than human sense of life and vigour.[57\8] Conventionality and traditionalism, even the substitution of a cold and spurious mimicry for real feeling, are of course quite compatible with a form of religion which consists so much in the display of emotion. But even so, the most cautious observers[58\8] have declared that by such violent stimulation of every sense the "magicians" are thrown into a state of quite unfeigned exaltation. In accordance with the character and content of their normal modes of thought, the hallucinations to which the magicians are subject differ in different cases; but as a general rule their frenzy opens to them a way of immediate intercourse, frequently of complete communion of being, with the gods. This is the only explanation which will account for the fact that, like the inspired Bakchantes of Thrace, the magicians and priests of so many peoples are called by the name of the divinity to whom their "enthusiastic" worship elevates them.[59\8] The impulse to union with God, the extinction of the individual in the divine--these are what form the fundamental points of contact between the mysticism of the most highly cultivated and talented people and the emotional religion of primitive "savages". Even the external machinery of excitement and stimulation are not always dispensed with by the mystics:[60\8] they are always the same as those with which we are already familiar in the orgiastic religion of primitive peoples--music, the giddy whirl of the dance, narcotic stimulants. Thus (to take the most striking example out of many that might be given) the dervishes of the Orient whirl round in their violent dances to the rattle of drums, and the sound of flutes till the last stages of excitement and exhaustion are reached. The